The Voices in Jared Loughner's Head Shall Not Be Respected

Jan 12, 2011

WHO PROFITS FROM A WARNING FULFILLED? Like those before Loughner — including Charles Guiteau, whose image appeared on the cover of Puck magazine shortly after he killed President Garfield — his was a political act of madness. And politicians know how to light a distant fuse. (Arizona courtroom sketch by Bill Robles)

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Not long before the bloody mayhem erupted in Tucson, Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, may have committed ritual seppuku on his embryonic 2012 presidential campaign. In an interview, Barbour waxed nostalgic about his growing-up days in Yazoo City, just as the civil-rights movement was hitting a high tide of bloody mayhem in his home state.

Barbour spoke fondly of the old White Citizens Councils, the organizations formed in many Southern towns in which a town's respectable folk would band together to resist integration through the economic and social sway they had over the community. They wore suits and fine shoes. They spoke the language of law and of commerce, and hardly any of them were impolite enough to mention the people across town, in overalls and dungboots, who believed in rather more direct action. But there always was a common purpose there. They would not be the last people to do this. Oh, no. There would always be others.

In Carry Me Home, her luminous memoir of growing up in the genteel precincts of Birmingham during that city's ferocious resistance to racial equality, Diane McWhorter writes simply and clearly about those parts of the past that Haley Barbour, that fathead, tried to wish away, to his everlasting shame:

The bombing of the 16th street Baptist Church was the endgame in the city fathers' long and profitable tradition of maintaining their industrial supremacy through vigilantism...

Not that anyone standing in that buffet line that Sunday had anything to do with the lethal package planted during those dark hours before the blast, when no sensible white person would be found in the colored section of downtown. The fuse had been lit years earlier, in the broad daylight of community approval, and even the cleanest hands ... did their bit to keep it dry as it sizzled through bad neighborhoods and across many decades before it blew up four black Sunday school girls on September 15, 1963.

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In short, God's curse on all the respectable people.

Political violence in America always has been a matter of great convenience to the people who actually own the country. They don't have to inspire it, or finance it. They can even deplore it. All they really have to do is control the reaction to it — not let it get so wild that it disturbs the stock market and, at the same time, not let the reality of political violence disrupt the anesthetic consensus that swaddles the centers of real power. Thus do we get lone gunmen, and ritualized "healing," and infinite misdirection. Earnest cud-chewing about talk-radio. David Gergen wonders about violence on TV and David Frum talks about marijuana, but nobody asks the old Latin question: Cui bono? Who profits?

There is even a reluctance in the prim and proper precincts of the elite corporate press to call what happened to Gabrielle Giffords an assassination attempt, and to call what Jared Loughner did a political act, because it is not nice to admit how thoroughly ingrained violence has become in our amnesiac American politics, because then we might ask who profits from walking on the fringe.

Loughner didn't open up on the crowd at first. He didn't climb a bell tower or crash his car into a cafeteria. He walked up to the person he most wanted to kill and he shot her in the head. That person was a member of the United States Congress. What Loughner did was an act of madness, surely, but it was a political act of madness, just as were the actions of Guiteau, and Czolgosz, and (maybe) Lee Harvey Oswald.

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But it was the Hunt brothers, rich as twin baby Croesuses, who paid for the newspaper ads calling John F. Kennedy a traitor that appeared in the Dallas newspaper on November 22, 1963. Since 1964, the respectable members of the national Republican party made a conscious choice to ally themselves with the remnants of American apartheid. Throughout the 1980s, conservatives in the South and West played footsie with dangerous, armed militia groups. There is an armed terrorist wing of the anti-choice movement that, to our knowledge, has not given the politicians allied with that movement a single moment's pause to reconsider their support for it. During the firestorm surrounding the prolonged death of Terri Schiavo, people came right up to the edge of threatening federal judges on the floor of the Congress, and this not long after a rightist gunman murdered the spouse of a federal judge on his doorstep.

None of the respectable people who did this ever paid a price for it. John Cornyn's still a senator. Tom DeLay's going to the hoosegow, but for money-laundering. Absent the indictment, he'd have been re-elected forever.

The country-club set allied itself for the purpose of gaining and maintaining political power with people whose idea of political violence is slightly more than theoretical, egged on by an exaltation of vicious clowns on the radio and television, and to have heard them all defend the open brandishing of firearms at political rallies last summer was to have heard clearly the warning.

"We don't have guns, but we know people who do."

Christ. Didn't any of those people have any qualms about wearing the same T-shirt so proudly worn by Timothy McVeigh, the mass murderer of Oklahoma City? Did it even come up in the sales meetings of the companies that produced them?

Who are the respectable people, the people who light the distant fuse and then walk away? Who owns the companies who produce the T-shirts? Who markets them? Who ships them? Who are the respectable politicians who go to the conventions where those shirts are sold and walk by them without even the faintest remark?

Who are the people who own the companies who own the radio stations? Who are the people who sell the ads to companies that finance the rhetoric with impotence treatments and gold-bug scams? Who are the boards of directors? Who are the respectable people?

They do it because they can make a buck and nobody ever wonders why. They do it because they can gain and maintain political power, while daintily calling for "civility" and telling us that we are good people who don't respond to tactics like this. This doesn't work? Try gun control. It has disappeared as an issue. Some dolt in Detroit tries to ignite his underpants and, as a result, we all consent to being groped and fluoroscoped by some underpaid TSA agent with a YouTube account back home. But shoot a Congressman — hell, kill a federal judge — and the discussion of why maniacs can arm themselves dies almost a'borning.

Do you think this president can even feint in that direction? The ground's already been prepared to make even a tepid attempt as controlling lethal weaponry the act of a Kenyan Nazi usurper with the black helicopters at his disposal.

They do it because it works.

There is no great lesson to be learned from what happened in Tucson, because we won't learn the greatest one — to stop being such suckers, to cease being a nation of easy marks, to acknowledge the darkness in ourselves and in our country and to recognize it so well that we are able to resist the attempts to bring it out of us so someone can get elected or turn a buck on it. We must pity the deranged, and we must goddamn all gentlemen.

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